Tag Archives: Cyberwar

Episode 183: North Korea’s Chances of Winning a 2040 Gold Medal in Basketball May Be Better than You Think Richard Danzig, former Navy Secretary and a serious defense and technology thinker, speaks to us about the technology tsunami and what it means for the Pentagon. Among the risks: lots more accidents, some of them catastrophic,… Continue Reading

Episode 180: Robots and Cyber and Space, Oh My! The Pantsing of International Humanitarian Law In a delightfully iconoclastic new book, Jeremy Rabkin and John Yoo take the air out of 75 years worth of inflated claims about the law of war. They do it, not for its own sake, though God knows that would… Continue Reading

In this episode, we interview Jim Miller, co-chair of a Defense Science Board panel that reported on how the US is postured for cyberconflict and the importance of deterrence. The short answer: deterring cyberconflict is important because our strategic cyberconflict posture sucks. The DSB report is thoughtful, detailed, and troubling. Jim Miller manages to convey… Continue Reading

172: The Self-Referential Episode In this news-only episode, we cover the irresistible story of the week: Trump, Russia, and the Media. It’s especially irresistible for us because we’ve had two of the protagonists on as guests. I make the bold prediction that Shane Harris’s stories on Russia collusion and the Trump campaign will be seen as… Continue Reading

Episode 169. In Which Ben Wittes Gets to the Right of Stewart Baker, to the Likely Eventual Embarrassment of Them Both In the news roundup, Benjamin Wittes makes a cameo appearance, defending Jim Comey (but not the FBI) from my suggestion that leaking has a long and unattractive history at the FBI. Brian Egan takes… Continue Reading

It’s an extended news roundup with plenty of debate between me and Nuala O’Connor, the President and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT). We debate whether and how CDT should pay more attention to Chinese technology abuses and examine the EU ministers’ long list of privacy measures to be rolled back and… Continue Reading

Over the past few years, the US government has invested heavily in trying to create international norms for cyberspace. We’ve endlessly cajoled other nations to agree on broad principles about internet freedom and how the law of war applies to cyberconflicts. Progress has been slow, especially with countries that might actually face us in a cyberwar…. Continue Reading

Our guest for Episode 62 is is Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and CTO of CrowdStrike Inc. and former Vice President of Threat Research at McAfee. Dmitri unveils a new Crowdstrike case study in which his company was able to impose high costs on an elite Chinese hacking team. The hackers steadily escalated the sophistication of their… Continue Reading

Our guest for episode 61 of the Cyberlaw podcast is Joseph Nye, former dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard and three-time national security official for State, Defense, and the National Intelligence Council. We get a magisterial overview of the challenge posed by cyberweapons, how they resemble and differ from nuclear weapons, and (in passing)… Continue Reading

Richard Bejtlich is our guest for episode 59 of the Cyberlaw Podcast. Richard is the Chief Security Strategist at FireEye, an adviser to Threat Stack, Sqrrl, and Critical Stack, and a fellow at Brookings. We explore the significance of China’s recently publicized acknowledgment that it has a cyberwar strategy, FireEye’s disclosure of a gang using… Continue Reading

Our guest for Episode 50 of the Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast is David Sanger, the New York Times reporter who broke the detailed story of Stuxnet in his book, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power. David talks about his latest story, recounting how North Korea developed its cyberattack network, and… Continue Reading

Our interview focuses on Shane Harris and his new book, @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex. It’s a good read and a good book, marred by the occasional deployment of easy lefty tropes – government contractors are mercenaries, the military sees war as an opportunity to expand turf, cybersecurity is a threat to privacy,… Continue Reading

This week’s cyberlaw podcast begins as always with the week in NSA. We suspect that a second tech exec meeting with the President (for two hours!) bodes ill for the intelligence community, or at least the 215 metadata program, as does the shifting position of usually stalwart NSA supporters like Dianne Feinstein and Dutch Ruppersberger…. Continue Reading

The old Cold War export control alliance, now known as the Wassenaar Arrangement, hasn’t exactly been a hotbed of new controls since Russia joined the club. But according to the Financial Times, the 41-nation group is preparing a broad new set of controls on complex surveillance and hacking software and cryptography. I suspect that the… Continue Reading

Chinese hacking continues to build anger in American business and government circles. As a result, private companies may be encouraged to do more than passively defend their networks as evidenced by the recent report of a commission headed by two Obama appointees, former US Ambassador to China (and minor GOP Presidential candidate) Jon Huntsman and… Continue Reading

A revised draft of the cybersecurity bill contains information sharing provisions that were heavily negotiated between the Obama administration and privacy groups. This effort at compromise has prompted the usual ambiguous praise from privacy groups. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, though “pleased” with the progress, complained that the measure still “contains broad language around the ability… Continue Reading

Over the past three years think tanks in China and in the US have been conducting what could be called “proxy” negotiations on cyberwar and cyberespionage. The China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations and the US Center for Strategic and International Studies are establishment institutions, with just enough independence from their governments to make the talks… Continue Reading

Earlier, I wrote an article for Foreign Policy about the foolishness of letting lawyers determine our cyberwar strategy. The ABA Journal has posted an extensive, no-holds-barred debate over the views expressed in that article. Gen. Charles Dunlap, a former deputy judge advocate general of the US Air Force, contradicts my article with passion, after which I… Continue Reading

Stewart Baker

Stewart served as the first Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security where he set cybersecurity policy, including inward investment reviews focused on network security. More

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Steptoe Cyberblog, with its sometimes contrasting insights, serves up opinionated and provocative thoughts on the issues — especially cybersecurity and privacy — that arise at the intersection of law, information technology, and security.

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